


Our Better Part Remains

by Kainosite



Category: Political RPF - UK 20th-21st c.
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Class Differences, Heathites, M/M, Old Labour, Whiply Shenanigans, Whips (not the fun kinky kind)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-07
Updated: 2015-01-07
Packaged: 2018-03-06 11:18:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,750
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3132530
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kainosite/pseuds/Kainosite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Amidst the hectic chaos of a minority government, Walter snatches a moment of peace with his opposite number.  But trusting a Tory is just asking for trouble, and Walter's dæmon may have a few choice words for him...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Our Better Part Remains

**Author's Note:**

> A day may come when someone writes a profound, meaningful Walter Harrison/Jack Weatherill fic that explores the complex political realities of their era and the nuances of their decades-long friendship.
> 
> But it is not this day. This day you are getting a dæmon AU with whiply skullduggery and blowjobs.

“I always thought she were a mink, but she isn’t, is she? ‘Fisher’, it said in _Who’s Who_.”

They’re lazing about together in Walter’s office, languidly post-coital with half an hour to kill until the night’s vote. Once the Labour whips realized how many crucial private negotiations he’d be having with the Odds and Sods, they shuffled a few people around and got him an office of his very own down the corridor, with a door that locks. It’s handy at times like these. And he doesn’t mind flaunting it in front of Jack, crammed into the Opposition Whips’ Office with its battered old chairs and its indelible smell of cabbage.

Walter is sprawled out on the sofa with Parasceva curled up possessively on his chest, her great clawed feet tucked up under her like a housecat’s. It surprises him every time that she doesn’t purr. If she were the wife’s Cuthbert he’d twattle her ears, but that’s an intimacy too far for them, for all that he and Jack know each other very well these days and in ways that would get an MP into dire trouble if they made it into Walter’s little black book. (Walter has a policy about cross-party romances, which is that they’re all right as long as they’re kept discreet enough he never finds out about them. Obviously he can’t apply it in this particular case, so he’s amended it to ‘discreet enough that Michael Cocks never finds out’. Michael only knows what Walter tells him, which puts him at something of an unfair advantage, but who ever said life was fair?)

They’ve already compared their numbers for the night – duty before pleasure – so there’s nowt to do now but indulge in idle chit-chat and enjoy the warm weight of Jack’s living soul pressed up against his breast. It’s nice to have a cuddle now and again. It’s the thing he’s missed most since Kelda settled; she slept in his arms every night when he was a lad, but she won’t let him hold her now. Birds don’t. It musses their feathers.

Jack himself is sitting at Walter’s desk reading through something or other, constituency paperwork or the whips’ questions for next week’s PMQs. He’s never been one for idleness, Jack, and he’s the picture of ministerial diligence sitting there primly in his three-piece suit. He always tidies himself up straight away after so you’d never know to look at him what they’ve been up to. But to Walter’s familiar gaze there’s a softness to him that wasn’t there when he came in, an easing of the tired lines of his face and the rigid set of his shoulders, and of course there’s Parasceva, dozing on Walter’s chest instead of slinking round the edges of the room like a shadow or clambering up the bookshelves.

At Walter’s question they look up in unison, Parasceva turning her sharp little bright-eyed face up to him and Jack politely setting down his papers. 

“That’s right.”

“Not exactly a good English animal, is she?” Walter teases. “‘Ranges across the boreal forests of North America.’ How’d you end up with a thing like that?”

Jack and his dæmon exchange amused glances, and Jack chuckles. Walter’s well-honed ear detects an edge of condescension. Jack is nice enough for a Tory, as good as they come, but that’s fishing in a very shallow pool and there’s always that middle class snobbery bubbling away an inch below the surface. They’ll be rubbing along together just fine and then Walter will say something to set him off sneering again. It tends to blow up into a row, so Walter would mind his p’s and q’s just to preserve the peace, but half the time he doesn’t even know what he’s done. Like just now– what the hell was so bloody déclassé about asking what inspired Jack’s dæmon to pick an obscure Canadian carnivore?

For all that he started it, Walter bristles, and from her perch on the back of the sofa Kelda whips her head around to watch Jack with a baleful eye.

“What?”

“Just marveling at your sudden command of mustelid taxonomy,” Jack says, trying to repress a smile. He is at least _trying_ , so Walter decides to let him off this time.

“I looked it up in t’library.”

“Have a lot of spare time in the Government Whips’ Office, do you?”

“Now we have this pact with the Liberals,” Walter says lightly, although that’s a lie. The Liberals have no whipping operation to speak of; Beith can’t deliver their votes with any kind of regularity. The pact will save the Government in the event of a confidence motion. For everything else, they’re on their own, and it’s the same mad scramble to divert enough Tories and round up enough of the Odds and Sods to push the Government over the line that it’s always been.

Jack must know it, but he too prefers to preserve the peace, and he’s sharp enough to recognize when he’s narrowly skirted a landmine. Instead of challenging Walter’s claim he just lifts his eyebrows in polite skepticism and answers the question.

“They tried to breed them, you know, for the fur. Someone must have brought over a live one to Savile Row when I was a boy. We don’t remember it, but Jill and I must have clamored to see it– and of course Parasceva would only have needed a few seconds to get the imprint.”

“How can you not remember? She wasn’t showing it off, something as rare as that?”

When his parents took him to the menagerie in Blackpool as a lad Kelda had swanked about it in front of their schoolmates for months: a leopard, a python, a tapir, so many exotic forms and so easy to hold now that she had a live model to work from and she didn’t have to cobble their bodies together with guesswork like a dragon or a unicorn.

Jack shakes his head. “No, she never used it. You were always a moth when we were at school,” he says to her in a quick aside, half fond and half accusatory.

“You were always hiding in the toilets when we were at school,” his dæmon replies tartly.

Her low voice sends a thrill through Walter. He can count on one hand the number of times he’s heard it; dæmons don’t speak much in the presence of others, or when they do, it’s for the ears of their person only. That she should answer like this in front of him – on _top_ of him, he can feel the thrum of the words against his chest – is an unexpected token of their trust.

So too is the rare glimpse into Jack’s childhood. He’ll talk, oftentimes at great length and long past the patience of his audience, about the history of Parliament or the English wool industry, but his own history remains a closed book. He’s quick enough to brandish that bloody thimble, but ask him about his schooldays and he’ll just smile and gently steer the conversation into some safer, less personal channel. Maybe Parasceva has just given them a clue as to why. Walter feels a whip’s glee at getting his hands on an embarrassing personal secret, and he’s deeply touched that she would trust him not to use it against them. But there’s a thread of pity in it too, because Tories are fucking horrible and Jack has had to live amongst them his whole life. A public school education isn’t a fate Walter would wish on anyone.

Jack winces and a bit of color rises to his cheeks – it obviously wasn’t _his_ idea to divulge that little piece of personal history – so Walter decides to be a gentleman and change the subject for him.

“Brought over for the fur trade, eh?” He runs his fingers through Parasceva’s plush coat, causing Jack’s cheeks to redden for quite a different reason. “It’s a bit ironic, considering.”

“Considering?”

They’re both looking at him blankly, but Kelda has taken his meaning. She launches herself off the sofa and sails over to alight on Jack’s shoulder with a single downbeat of her wide brindled wings. She settles onto her new perch and then leans over to peck him lightly on his bald crown.

“Oh, very funny,” snaps Jack, batting her away more testily than Walter feels the occasion merits. Maybe it wasn’t such a light peck after all; she has a beak on her, his Kelda. Or maybe Jack’s just sensitive about his hair. Walter wouldn’t have pegged him for the type, but God knows he’s fussy enough about his clothes. Unfazed, Kelda hops down to the desk, where Jack studies her irritably.

“And what about Kelda? A skua, that’s no English bird.”

“They come down t’coasts sometimes.”

“To bully the other birds.”

“They look after their own,” says Walter, with the practiced ease of someone who’s been fending off that particular accusation since the age of fourteen.

Jack snorts. “That’s one way of putting it.”

“We get things done,” Walter says comfortably, and Kelda dips her beak in agreement. He’s come in for his fair share of ribbing over the years– skuas aren’t common dæmons this far south, and they don’t have a pretty reputation. But he’s never been ashamed of her. They never even went through that awkward adolescent phase of hating each other while they came to terms with their mutual inadequacies: Kelda’s failure to settle as something impressive like a lioness or an eagle, Walter’s ridiculous stick-out ears and his persistent tendency to say stupid things in front of pretty girls.

The truth is he’d exulted in her from the first, his big, fierce seabird with her wickedly curved bill. Watching her wheeling overhead that first day after she settled, a dark silhouette against the grey Yorkshire sky, he took her shape for a promise that he would never have to go underground to choke to death on coal dust like his father. Back then he’d never imagined they would fly so high and far as this, that forty years on governments would survive or fall by their wits and skill. But he’d seen in her that there was a power in him, a potential to do something of value, and for a lad growing up in the poor end of Dewsbury that was a knowledge worth having.

Jack laughs in rueful acknowledgement. “You certainly do. Often things of dubious democratic legitimacy, but you get them done, all right.”

“Oi!” says Walter, although he can’t really argue with that one.

“A better match you couldn’t hope to find. Still, I always did wonder– Skuas are great travelers, aren’t they? Doesn’t it bother you being stuck here all the time?”

“Nah. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t say no to the occasional fact-finder somewhere warm and tropical, but–”

“That’s something to look forward to, then. Once we chuck you out you might have time!” Jack interjects brightly.

“Ha ha ha. Nah, it’s all right, this. I wanted to travel when I were young, but I saw me fill of foreign parts during the war. And when I came back I realized there was more than enough needed doing right here at home.”

“That’s very noble of you–” Jack begins, but whatever mockery he has planned is interrupted by a loud ring from the telephone. He jumps halfway out of his skin. The phone is an inch away from his elbow and it’s clear he’d completely forgotten it was there. This late at night with the curtains drawn it can feel like they’re sealed off in their own little world, just the four of them in the circle of the lamplight.

“Wait, let me–” Walter says, and Parasceva springs up onto the back of the sofa to let him up so he can answer it, but they’re too slow. Jack has already picked up.

“Labour Deputy Whip’s Office: your members bribed, your votes miscounted, your timetables inconveniently rearranged. How may I assist– ah. Just a moment.” He puts a hand over the receiver and turns to Walter. “Mrs. Taylor for you.”

That can’t be good. She ought to be out double-checking her list; she wouldn’t be calling him now unless something was wrong.

Jack knows it too. After almost five years as Walter’s opposite number, he’s as familiar with their procedures as Walter is. There’s a cold gleam of amusement in his eyes as he sets the phone down on the desk and vacates Walter’s chair, inviting him back to his place with a sweeping bow. He has, Walter observes with irritation but without surprise, vacated Walter’s chair to the _right_ , so that he’s pinned between the desk and the bookshelf, close enough to overhear Ann’s side of the conversation on the other end of the line. Walter glances pointedly at the sofa, a hint which Jack ignores completely.

“Jack.”

“What?” Jack asks, his face a picture of studied innocence.

“You know perfectly well what.”

“You can’t possibly think that I would eavesdrop..!” Jack exclaims. The tone of heartfelt injury would be more convincing if he could stop his lips from quirking up at the edges.

“It’s a bloody certainty you’re going to eavesdrop. I’m just trying to minimize the damage,” Walter says. “Behave, or you can wait out in t’corridor.”

Jack sighs. “Naturally I would forget anything I heard, but if it would set your mind at rest...”

He trudges the four paces across the room and stations himself beside the sofa with an air of martyrdom. Wouldn’t want to sit down and get comfortable; someone might mistake that for a concession that Walter had been right to shift him. For pity’s sake. Walter really ought to throw him out altogether – Jack can hardly help eavesdropping on Walter’s half of the conversation, and there’s no telling what Parasceva’s keen ears can pick up at this range – but she won’t relay anything to Jack until they’re alone, and if it’s something that pertains to tonight’s vote they’re going to find out in half an hour anyway. This way at least Walter has them where he can keep an eye on them until then.

He sits down to take the call, and Kelda hops closer and cocks her head beside the receiver so she can listen in.

“Right, it’s me. What’s up?”

Ann immediately confirms his worst misgivings with the three words every whip fears most.

“Walter, we’re short.”

“What? _How_?”

Christ, don’t let it be another death. It can’t be, not if she’s telling him like that. Surely Ann hasn’t been in the Whips’ Office long enough to lead with the vote count instead of condolences?

“It’s Stan Newens. His car wouldn’t start. So he decided to play the big man, you know, fix it himself, but of course he couldn’t. Only by the time he was willing to admit that to himself he’d missed the last train. And it’s too far for a cab, really, so he just stayed home.”

“What do you mean, it’s too far for a cab? He’s Harlow; that’s practically in fucking London! Why the hell didn’t he call in, then?”

“He did. Only we were all out confirming our lists, so Michael took it, and Michael told him not to bother coming in because he was working from this morning’s list when we thought we still had Clement Freud. No one had the complete list but you, and you were...”

...getting sucked off by a Tory.

“I was here with Jack. Yeah, I know.”

“I’m really sorry, Walter.”

“Not your fault, love.”

“But we should have cross-checked our counts earlier! We had the complete list between us if only we’d thought to check. It _is_ our fault; you shouldn’t have to know everything!”

“Ann, love, you’re going to be a magnificent Chief Whip some day, and when you are I’m sure you’ll arrange things better than this, but for now you’re responsible for the twenty-five MPs in your flock and that’s all. It’s my job to see that a majority walks through that lobby. This is my cock-up and no one else’s; I won’t have you blaming yourself for it. Right? That’s an order.”

“Yeah, all right,” she says, sounding unconvinced.

Kelda looks up at him sharply, and Walter makes a note to have a little chat with Ann later. It’s all very well to take the job seriously; every vote matters and the Prime Minister is counting on them to get things through. But sooner or later something like this always happens, someone takes ill or their wife has a baby or Eric Heffer decides to oppose the Government on some key vote at the last minute just to be a shit. Holding yourself personally responsible for every accident and arsehole is a recipe for a rapid descent into madness, not for successful government.

That sage advice will have to wait, though. Right now they have a crisis on their hands.

“What are we going to _do?_ ” Ann asks forlornly.

“Ask Michael to ring Alan Beith and see if there’s any chance at all we can get another one of his lot. They can’t _all_ be in their constituencies, and he might be able to talk someone round if they understand it’s an emergency. I’ll go and have a word with the Nats. We only need one more and we’ve got a dozen abstentions; it’s not impossible.”

“It’s not likely, though, is it? If they wanted to vote with us we’d have them already. What if we can’t find someone?”

“Then we’ll tack it on to some other bill, or maybe Albert can find a way to do it through a statutory instrument and we won’t need primary legislation at all, or we’ll bring it in next year.”

“‘Next _year_ ’?” Jack echoes incredulously from his place by the sofa. Walter transfers the phone to his other hand so he can give this remark the two-fingered rebuttal it deserves.

“It’s not a supply bill, it’s not the end of the world. We’’ll manage,” he says firmly, for both their benefit. “Off you go now. I’ll talk to the Nats.”

He hangs up, blows out a long breath, and exchanges a grim glance with Kelda. “Bloody hell.”

“One short?” Jack asks, and Walter can actually _hear_ him smiling. “I’m so sorry.”

“Yeah, you sound gutted.”

“Car trouble, is it?”

Kelda figures it out a fraction of a second before he does, and a hot spark of understanding jumps between them. Walter turns to glare at Jack.

“You _knew_ about this,” he accuses, not without a certain degree of admiration. “You conniving Tory bastard!”

Parasceva flows over the back of the sofa and up Jack’s arm like oil. She wraps herself around his shoulders and settles there, a living stole radiating a sly self-satisfaction that is perfectly mirrored in Jack’s smile.

“You didn’t really think that blowjob came free, did you?” the Tory whip asks.

“You didn’t say you were buying a bloody vote with it!”

“You didn’t ask.”

It’s true, and he should have. He really, _really_ should have. Jack never lies. A few probing questions and Walter could have had the truth out of him and averted this whole sorry mess. He can’t even be that angry with Jack over it, because it’s his own sloppiness to blame. It’s Jack’s job to take advantage whenever he can and Walter’s not to let him.

“What’d you do, put sugar in Newens’ tank?” he asks sourly.

“No, although that’s certainly an idea for the future. No. I just happen to be very well informed.”

Kelda mantles at this smug evasion, spreading her wings and croaking at him, and Jack raises his hands placatingly.

“You know I have people watching your houses.”

“Yeah, I do know that, and it’s creepy. I should have the police on you,” Walter says.

“He’s a leftist agitator. I imagine the police are watching his house themselves.”

This, unfortunately, is also true, but it seems unsporting to capitalize on it. Bad enough that the Tories have the businessmen and the bankers and the press barons on their side without them co-opting the police and the security services as well. Aren’t they meant to serve impartially, without fear or favor? In the spirit of good sportsmanship but without any real hope, Walter asks,

“I don’t suppose you’d give us a pair?”

Jack laughs. “On half an hour’s notice, because someone didn’t want to pay for a cab? No, Walter, I don’t suppose I _would_ like to give you a pair.”

“Wun’t have been half an hour’s notice if you’d told me.”

“If I’d told you an hour ago you wouldn’t need a pair. Which, obviously, is why I didn’t tell you.”

And why he’d sucked Walter off, to make sure no one else would get a chance to tell him either. On the scales of inter-party duplicity Jack’s little diversion is so feather-light as to scarcely tip the pan – Walter has done far worse to the Tories in his time – but it’s always unpleasant to lose, and to lose like _this_ … Their professional obligation to thwart each other at every turn has always been a cornerstone of their friendship, and when friendship turned into something more they both knew they were raising the stakes in a dangerous game. If Walter is honest, that was part of the appeal. But it’s not often one of them manages to exploit the other’s affections as spectacularly as this.

He’s man enough to admit it: he feels a little hurt.

And he wonders too how much of the cozy camaraderie of earlier was a ploy to buy time. Jack’s dæmon curled up on his chest, her warm little body keeping him from rising, her low voice telling him secrets from Jack’s past... He’d wanted that intimacy and they’d given it to him, hadn’t they? But half a whip’s job is knowing how to give MPs what they want.

He says sullenly, “That was a low trick, Jack.”

“What trick? I gave you our tally fair and square. You can hardly blame me if you didn’t know yours.”

Sensing perhaps that they have overstayed their welcome, Parasceva leaps down from Jack’s shoulder and bounds over to the door, sitting up and waiting with dignified impatience for him to join her. Jack returns to the desk to collect his papers. Kelda steps up onto Walter’s wrist so he can get at them, but they’re neither of them minded to give him enough space to make it comfortable. They stay where they are and let Jack reach around them awkwardly to retrieve the scattered pages.

When he’s gathered them all up he taps the clumsy pile on the desk a few times to square the edges and stows it carefully in his embarrassingly enormous leather notebook. He tucks the folder under his arm, hesitates for a moment, and then lays a hand on Walter’s.

It’s not a gesture of apology, never that, not between them. But it’s an acknowledgement of Walter’s hurt, a recognition that what he did transgressed some unspoken boundary and perhaps he will think twice before doing it again. So they keep faith with each other in the midst of their betrayals.

“I’ll see you in the Chamber,” Jack says.

Walter nods, not looking at him, but he lifts Kelda up to his shoulder so she can watch Jack go. He hears the door shut behind him, but it’s a long while before be can rouse himself to pull out his little black book and start looking up the numbers for the SNP.

“Shall we try Argyll or go straight to the top?” he asks Kelda, but from his shoulder there comes no answer but a brooding silence. Walter considers the odds he’ll be able to coax anyone into the Government lobby with half his attention caught up in her sulking, and puts the phone back on the hook.

“Something on thy mind, cocker spadge?”

He already knows what she’s going to say, but it’s better to have out with it than to have her sit there in a sour lump, grimly thinking it.

“We should stop, Walter,” Kelda says for the hundredth time. “It’s starting to affect thy judgement.”

He laughs, force of habit, because happen she’s right – he should have seen that ploy of Jack’s coming a mile off – and all his training as a politician and a whip is to feign a confidence he doesn’t feel. Not that it does him a bit of good with his own dæmon, who can sense his chagrin as clearly as he can sense her worry.

“Sound judgement. That’s what tha’s for, in’t it?”

“Tha wun’t have thanked me for interfering before. Don’t think I don’t know what was running through thy big soft head when he got down on his knees.”

Despite her scolding and the mess they’re in Walter can’t help grinning a little at the memory. “Well. He is _very_ good at that.”

Kelda gives his ear a sharp tweak with her bill, a real sacrifice in the cause of sexual propriety since she does it hard enough to feel it herself. Walter can feel the faint echo of her discomfort, mirrored back at him beneath the searing pain in his own ear.

“That and other things,” she snaps. “Winning votes, for one.”

“One vote. We’ll put it right.”

“We won’t. Tha knows we won’t.”

“And there’s him to think of too,” Walter goes on, because happen Kelda’s right about that as well. “What about his judgement, eh? Tha’s not suggesting that Tory is better at this seduction business than me?”

She hesitates, weighing her words carefully.

“I’m suggesting he’s playing for different stakes. When people like us get involved with people like him, even if they deal straight with each other and they each put in the same, it’s people like us who always come out the worse. It’s just the way of the world, lad: different rules for us and him. Like what he said before about t’police– we couldn’t do what he’s done and post someone from the local CLP outside every Tory MP’s house to spy on ‘em. We couldn’t do that even if we wanted to.”

“All right, so it’s not a fair fight. It never was, we knew that going in. That’s why we’re here, in’t it? But we’re winning! Three weeks they gave us, and look where we are. Three years and counting!”

“Yeah, and that’s always the way of it: you keep winning until you lose. We’re going to lose more than that bet, Walter.”

He hates her pessimism, and he hates it more because he knows she’s right. Dæmons have a heightened sensitivity to the political weather, but the atmosphere in Parliament is so charged these days that even dull human senses can’t miss it. Everyone’s felt it, even the backbenchers. Some terrible cataclysm has been brewing ever since the election, swirling together out of the chaos like a storm cloud. Benn, Thatcher, the Liberals, the Nats, Northern Ireland, that fucking IMF loan– it’s all building up to something, some great tempest that will sweep away everything in its path. Everything the whips have done, all the frantic wrangling and bargaining and arm-twisting, has been done to put off the day when that storm breaks, to give the winds a chance to die down a little and the black clouds a chance to disperse. But it’s going to break sooner or later, and when it does...

When it does he wants to have Jack Weatherill at his side, that’s the long and short of it. If Walter has been a bit stupid about him it’s because Jack is an emblem of the old comity, everything that’s good and decent in Parliament, everything they stand to lose. To give him up feels like giving up on all of it. And if all Walter’s efforts are in vain and the Government does fall to the extremists – Thatcher or Benn, it hardly matters which – well then, at least he can have Jack. They can stand amidst the rubble and mourn for their country together.

He reaches up to stroke Kelda’s head, the place where the feathers grow soft and downy beneath her bill. They both know he’s not going to end the affair.

“This won’t end well,” she predicts quietly, for the hundredth time, and hops down beside the phone to consider the internal politics of the SNP.


End file.
